Musicians composing original works for cellphones strive for greatness in 20 seconds or less.

By Stephanie N. Mehta

December 12, 2005

(FORTUNE Magazine) – DISCO D IS FRUSTRATED. THE 25-year-old deejay/producer/ composer needs to catch a flight to Australia, he hasn't packed, and his mobile phone keeps ringing.
And yet he is stuck in his home recording studio in Brooklyn's Williamsburg neighborhood, playing, recording, and re-recording the same eight bars of music for more than an hour.

O'Loughlin, a 60-year-old music veteran who discovered such acts as rappers Salt-N- Pepa, is unmoved. "This melody is a gift," he urges. "Trust me on this. I know."

And so, for about the 30th time, Disco D cranks up his drum machine and lays down beats. Dee Robert, a singer and songwriter, steps up to the mike. "Oh, I'm going to love you
tonight," she sings in a bluesy voice. "Oh, I'm going to love you tonight."

Disco D, O'Loughlin, and Robert are pioneers in a new art form: the ringtone. Today most ringtones for cellular phones are snippets of existing songs or compositions, with top-40 and
hip-hop hits making up the bulk of the downloaded tones. But a new generation of songwriters sees the mobile phone as an emerging medium for artistic expression, and they are
composing original material exclusively for cellphones: the ringtone for ringtone's sake.

It isn't easy, as the Williamsburg crew's experience shows. After all, pop and rap artists have three whole minutes to tell a story with their music. Those jazz and classical dudes
get even longer. But when you're writing a ringtone, you have about 20 seconds to convey a message of love, heartbreak, or hope--or at least come up with an infectious hook. "With
ringtones, it has to be memorable," O'Loughlin says. "And it's got to have a little bite to it."

O'Loughlin's perfectionism could have a big payday. Ringtones are a shockingly lucrative business, generating more than $2 billion in annual worldwide revenues for the record labels
that license their tunes and the retailers and phone companies that sell the tones for about $2 a pop. Everywhere you look, non-musicians are trying to cash in on the craze: Movie
studios want to make bits of film dialogue available--instead of your phone trilling, perhaps you'd like it to have Jack Nicholson say, "Here's Johnny!" And sports figures are
recording shout-outs that fans can buy in lieu of regular rings. Disco D first got turned on to the possibilities of ringtones when retailer Best Buy decided to turn some music he'd
written for one of its commercials into a ringtone and offer it on the Best Buy website. (In fact, composing standalone ringtones is a lot like writing music for commercials or
jingles. "It's a very similar concept," says Dee Robert. "You're trying to push a product in a very short amount of time.")

It is one thing to write a killer ringtone, but then it needs to get airplay, or phone play. That's where companies like Jamster come in. Jamster, a unit of Internet services company
VeriSign, formats music for distribution on mobile devices and markets the ringtones on its website and through TV ads on MTV, BET, and other music-oriented networks. Jamster even has
its own studios, where engineers will take ringtones and replay them on different cellphones to hear how the clips will sound--much the way studios used to keep various radios on hand
to hear how, say, Ray Charles's "I Can't Stop Loving You" would sound on a range of car and tabletop radios.

O'Loughlin, who owns a production company called Next Plateau Entertainment, has compiled about 20 original ringtones from various artists, which he's pitched to Jamster executives,
who will decide which ones to license and market--and perhaps turn into hits.

Ringtone technology came out of Finland, which may not rule the music world but definitely rocks when it comes to cellphones. A decade or so ago the Finns had a problem. Big-shot
executives would be sitting in a conference room, they'd all put their phones on the table, and--these being important people--they'd all have the same hot gadget. Then one of the
phones would ring and everyone would lunge because there was no way of knowing whether the phone was Pekka's or Osto's. These people clearly needed ways to personalize their phones.

Around the same time, an engineer for Finnish cellphone maker Nokia figured out a way to change the sounds a phone makes by sending codes over the air--the same technology used to
ship short text messages. Nokia commercialized the service in 1997, and soon it wasn't merely executives using ringtones to personalize their phones (they all have Beatles ringtones,
anyway) but hip-hop-loving kids looking for the latest sound and harried soccer moms who program different rings for each of their kids and friends.

Yet only recently have serious music figures like Sir Mix-A-Lot viewed ringtones as a platform for their creativity. (The "Baby Got Back" rapper has produced "MixTones" for an outfit
called Versaly Entertainment.) That's largely due to new handsets that play "true tones," or reasonably good versions of recorded music. Before true tones came along, phones could
play only polyphonic or even cruder monophonic tones, which could capture just a song's melody, often in tinny-sounding bleats. Disco D, monitoring the "Love You Tonight" recording to
make sure a typical true-tone cellphone could replay the upper and lower notes, says he doesn't compose for older handsets. "I, like, want some control over how my art gets
transmitted."

Berry Gordy had his "Hitsville U.S.A." house. Phil Spector had the Brill Building. Eddie O'Loughlin has Disco D's home studio in Williamsburg, and a couple of other studios just like
it. A songwriter in the 1960s, O'Loughlin realized he had a knack for helping tweak other writers' work. He formed his own production company and in the 1970s helped launch the music
careers of Gloria Gaynor and John Travolta. In the 1990s he reinvented himself yet again as an executive for rap label Tommy Boy, then founded Next Plateau, in part to capitalize on
the ringtone craze. "The fact that he's still relevant is insane," says Disco D.

O'Loughlin is old-school in at least one way, however. Even though he's producing standalone ringtones, he wouldn't be averse to returning to the studio to expand the most popular
rings into full-length tracks. "There's nothing like making a hit record or producing a hit act," O'Loughlin says. As for musicians who think ringtones aren't real art, O'Loughlin
predicts that they'll eventually come around, recalling that when he got his start in the music business there were high-minded performers who wouldn't dream of appearing on
television. "There's more income in ringtones, and they are going to be important tools for launching a record, even a career," O'Loughlin says. Disco D's cellphone goes off again,
and O'Loughlin decides to take an informal poll: Who here uses ringtones? "Not one of us here has ringtones," he says. "Isn't that funny?"